Hairdressing and Advertising …

I remember reading something somewhere (how is that for a citation …) that compared the advertising industry to the hairdressing industry. Obsessed with youth, obsessed with trends, and obsessed with meaningless awards.

I didn’t really agree with this but I got me thinking that there are many similarities between the two, not in a negative sense. Why did I think about this? Well … I am moving from Sydney to Melbourne and I was wondering who would cut my hair when I get there (yes, focusing on the big issues … I have curly hair and a challenging hairline so a good hairdresser is important to maintain the public illusion of basic presentability)

It’s easy to find a competent hairdresser. They’re everywhere. But a good hairdresser – very hard to find, and often hard to get an appointment.

Like agencies. There’s plenty of okay agencies in media and creative. Loads. More than a country our size could need. But there’s only a select amount of great ones.

Anyway – the ad world and the hairdressing world have a few striking similarities. Here’s the ones I think are most relevant. Yes, this is a bit light hearted and does make me think I really need a haircut, but there’s also some truth in it.

They are defined and differentiated by great people. The name on the door means nothing without great people within the business, on the floor, interacting and servicing clients. You gravitate to people you like and trust. You want to work with people you feel have your interests at heart. Relationships are important.

You’re only as good as your last job. You can’t be complacent and you need to realise you are always judged on your last project. 8 years of great service can be ruined with 2 bad projects.

Cost isn’t that important if the value is clear. Cost only becomes an issue when you don’t feel you are getting the service you deserve.

You can make solid revenue selling ancillary products. But you need to be careful you don’t lose focus on your core and obsess about incremental revenue

Good client direction is key. If you don’t tell the hairdresser what you want chances are you will get a lousy haircut. It’s the same with a campaign. Neither practicioner has ESP.

Don’t overextend your welcome. You wouldn’t see a hairdresser go into the tax advice world – despite the fact all their clients probably file tax returns. It’s the same with agencies who want to be everything to their clients (Yes sure, we can try to advise you on supply chain logistics). Just because you can offer something doesn’t mean you should

Your work is always on show. A crappy haircut exists for everyone to see (trust me …) … so does a crappy campaign and a crappy media buy. And people have a knack for remembering the bad.

It is assumed you can provide the basics. A hairdresser shouldn’t need to rollout their training and creds everytime they see a client. Neither should an agency. There’s a certain level of skill that is implied.

Ok I’m off to book a haircut. I can recommend Piet at Wildfire in Surry Hills if anyone is needing a trim.

What’s worse? Media consolidation or too many outlets reporting the same thing?

There has been a lot of discussion of late around the consolidation of media ownership and its implications for ‘free press’ in Australia and the rest of the world. News Limited looking to increase its stake in Foxtel and FoxSports is the most current example of this.

However right now I think that in many ways we have far too much media, too much media that effectively report on the same things, taken from the same sources, published at the same time.

There is no doubt media consolidation will most probably irreversibly damage true investigative reporting, given that pageview driven investment will make investigative, or any long form reporting, seem like a negative ROI outcome. However the same pageview dominated approach has resulted in too many media outlets effectively reporting the same thing.

My feeling is it sort of works like this. There are probably 5 credible outlets in each category that truly break news, influence opinion and set the agenda. And this is globally. Across most things people are interested in – ie, rock music, world news, movies, gossip, dance music, entertainment, business, finance, advertising, technology, fashion, basketball, AFL, NFL, EPL, cycling etc etc.

Then there are about 300 hanger-on publications that exist to effectively re-report the news and views published on these 2-3 sites. This is either done by wire companies re-reporting and selling the summaries, or its by writers/editors sitting on twitter and waiting to cut and paste.

You see evidence of this all the time. Pitchfork will report something about a hyped band. 30 mins later 30 other publications have reported the same thing. 2 hours later 100 have. A day later everyone has. It’s the same with business – the WSJ will report a proposed deal … then 30 mins later the article is paraphrased and published. It keeps going and going. Ultimately the winner is the site with the best SEO.

It means information moves quickly. Even fake info. A few months back Mess&Noise made a story up about Jet releasing a best of which acknowledged the Pitchfork review of their second album on the cover, complete with mocked up fake Amazon listing. Within about 30 mins another Australian music site had reported it, citing the same Amazon page. Problem was the story was complete bullshit.

Anyway – a competitive media ownership landscape is really only good for everyone if it creates diversity. If everyone is reporting the same stuff, wouldn’t it just be easier to consolidate these 300 odd music sites into 2-3? Or these 100 business/finance sites into 4 or 5? Do we really need 1,000 different websites reporting on Kim Kardashian’s Twitter feed … or do we just need the Twitter feed?

In most of these cases we are oversupplied, and advertisers and users would benefit by consolidation. Advertisers would have access to a larger audience and less transaction points, and users would benefit from more successful media companies who could invest more into content creation.

Right now, media is so competitive it is becoming hard for anyone to really invest in content beyond what they’re doing. All that is creating is more of the same, more cheap content driven by reporting others quickly. Much of the money that could be going into creating content is going into SEO to index the content.

Right now media is over supplied. Especially online. We have too much choice but too little quality. Imagine what would happen if the publications that really broke news and drove discussion managed to see the majority of traffic their work created, instead of bottom feeders re-reporting them and taking the SEO juice?  I’d imagine we’d see overall an improvement in quality and ultimately more choice.

Fantastic Delites – A PR fail worth a mention

Woke up to this email from a kind reader who had a video to share with me. Something crazy had happened and he just happened to be in the crowd and wanted me to be across it. Amazing!

I clicked the link and it takes me to a “viral video” for Fantastic Delites snacks. Hrm okay. The video is neither hilarious nor do I really think most people would enjoy it enough to sit through it. 

Weirdly it was sent to my work email – of which there is no mention on this blog.

Email below. Surely there has to be better ways of promoting these ‘viral videos’ than this … try harder guys.

Hi,

I’ve been visiting Talking Digital for a few months now and really like it! I’m reaching out to you because of a video on youtube that I thought your other readers may enjoy. It’s a video of a crazy vending machine put in a mall in Australia that gets people to do hilarious things in order to get a snack for free.

The neat part of this story is I actually am in the crowd in part of the clip, so I’m pretty excited about it all! It was pretty crazy I happened upon a big group of people surrounding the machine and random dancing haha.

The video can be viewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8RIqJLUYSE

Hope you post,
Name removed

Well mate, you got your wish. I did post it.

 

Herald Sun Supercoach – a revenue trade off?

Those who know me well know that I am a bit of a tragic for Herald Sun’s AFL Supercoach. It hooks me in every year and since 2007 I have put together a team. When I was at Mindshare Melbourne we put together a league, and despite many of us moving into different roles the Mindshare league remains a pretty competitive one. My best effort was making the preliminary finals once (I think it was 2009).

Anyway – this isn’t about my Supercoach team. But it did inspire this post.

My team, Shepherd’s Pies, is currently 11th in the Mindshare league. 5 wins. 5 losses. Not bad, not great. The thing with Supercoach is it plays to 3 areas of weakness. 1/ Footy. The more the better for me. 2/ Competition. I want to win, I want the bragging rights. 3/ Sports analysis. Some of us like to read stats and pretend we’re football analysts.

Placing 11th doesn’t sit well with me. This season each player (of which there are over 330,000) gets 24 trades for their teams. These 24 trades need to last 24 rounds. Trades are the most valuable commodity in Supercoach and the strategy around trading is generally what separates medicore from great.

At round 12 I have 3 trades left. 12 more rounds of footy left and I have 3 trades to last me. It’s a disaster. But it got me thinking. I am surely not the only guy in this situation. Actually … I’d say there are probably another 150,000 people in a similar situation staring down the barrel of another poor season.

So … I was thinking. Imagine I could buy trades? Imagine the Herald Sun allowed me to buy a maximum of 4 trades per season at a cost of, say … $50 a trade.

Would I hand over the money?

Right now, yes. I’m in 11th place, 1 game out of the finals and 4 extra trades could be the difference between glory and shame. The Commercial Director in me thought – “someone like me could be worth an untapped extra $200 per year for the Herald Sun.”

My feeling is that, of the 330,000 odd Supercoach players, approximately 65,000 are passionate about it, or 20% of the competition. My gut tells me these 65,000 people would consider buying a trade if they could.

Let’s say 20,000 of them bought just 1 trade at $50 per trade … this would generate incremental revenue to the Herald Sun of $1m PA.

If 20,000 bought the 4 trades, that could generate $4m PA.

Not a bad result for putting a bit of extra code and some transaction capabilities on the Supercoach site.

$50 for me is an amount that feels right. You need to have invested significant time and effort into your team to consider a $50 cost to buy a trade. If it was $5 my feeling is most people would do it and it would impact the game. But $50 provides a barrier, but is also something you would consider if you’d spent, say 10-20 hours over the year carefully managing your Supercoach team.

Is it in the spirit of the game? Hard to say. But many online games adopt similar strategies where the user has to pay for an advantage. Perhaps it would add to Supercoach, making it an even more accurate representation of professional sport?

Extra revenue PA of $1m+ is something no business wouldn’t look at especially within minimal costs incurred. Even News Ltd.

Why doesn’t Twitter have local AU advertising sales?

For the past 12 months, Twitter’s Australian usage has remained around 2m people per month. That’s 2m people – not 2m unique browsers – and that’s consistent (plus or minus 5% either way) since mid 2011 (according to Nielsen).

And the user engagement is decent. 6+ visits per month, almost 30 mins spent on the twitter.com site per month. (source, again Nielsen)

Add mobile traffic and the third party clients (Hootsuite etc) and the number is probably closer to 2.5m, maybe 3m.

So … here is this platform doing very solid, consistent numbers in Australia. It has a lot of data on its users and even now still has a tonne of hype. Combine that with its relatively sluggish US revenue (in comparison to its current valuation) and Australia’s relatively high yield when it comes to digital advertising (far higher than the US and the majority of Europe) and it’s odd that Twitter hasn’t done what Facebook has done in Australia and set up a sales only office. Continue reading

Talking Digital Q&A #11: Alan Kohler

You normally see Alan Kohler on the news. He has been a staple on the ABC’s 7pm bulletin for years, giving over 1m Australian’s their finance and business info every weeknight. He’s also on Inside Business every Sunday and has been the pre-eminent business journalist in Australia for the better part of the last 4 decades – via the AFR, The Age, SMH and on his own Business Spectator publication.

Lately, Kohler has been making the news. Reports of Fairfax and News jostling for acquisition of the Kohler led AIBM have been coming thick and fast. This week, it’s News that’s being reported to be in the lead at a rumoured $30m+ valuation. Continue reading

Talking Digital Q&A #10: Simon Joyce, CEO MCM Entertainment Group. “Content remains king and technology is now queen”

2012 has been a strong year for MCM. It has enjoyed solid growth across its core take40 and HotHits properties, and earlier this year added VEVO to its portfolio for the Australian market. These digital assets, combined with MCM’s radio properties (such as My Generation) and digital platform services (such as Movideo and Igloo), place MCM in a unique position in terms of possessing cross platform media products with national footprint both in broadcast and digital.

Talking Digital spoke to MCM Entertainment CEO Simon Joyce about where business is heading for the group.

TD: MCM has made some of the larger financial committments to online video of any of the media companies in Australia over the past 5 years … would you say the development of the video space revenue wise has been slower than anticipated for all of us, and where do you see the next 3-5 years going? Continue reading

D10: Ari Emmanuel + Spotify

Two very interesting interviews from the D10 conference.

Sean Parker at D10 / Sean Parker (with limited input from Daniel Ek) from Spotify.

Ari Emmanuel at D10 / Ari Emmanuel from WME

I’m sure most people think one is the visionary and the other is out of touch. I’m just not sure they are right about which one is which.

Bob Lefsetz on the Parker video – “You’ll end up hating Sean Parker.”

Ek: “As we are the second largest revenue stream for the labels, then by definition we are the second largest revenue stream for the artists too.”

Ek makes a surprisingly rookie error by assuming that because Spotify is the second largest revenue source for the labels, it is therefore the second largest revenue source for artists. Absolutely not true – not by a long way. What about live performance, publishing, merchandise, endorsements etc?

Emmanuel may rub people the wrong way – but you cannot deny his success and what he has delivered for WME and its clients in a decade of radical entertainment transformation. His comments re Verizon and Google are certainly unpopular in the tech world but still valid. In one video you have Sean Parker almost taking joy in the erosion of value he helped destroy within the music industry, dodging questions around payments to artists; and on the other you have the ‘greedy agent’ trying to build value within content creators and industries and wondering why tech companies don’t seem too concerned with protecting entertainment content and IP.

Watching these videos – one seems honest and raw, the other seems slick and sales-heavy. Which one will the artists trust? My thoughts is they’d lean towards Emmanuel every time. At least they will know with WME what deal they’re on …

Talking Digital Q&A #9: Andrew Hunter, Network Director ninemsn

I first met Andrew years back when I was at Mindshare. We were exploring a content led initiative for a client and Andrew got involved to ensure it didn’t become a piece of dull branded content that the users had no interest in but it appeased the brand manager involved. Through collaboration and lots of insight we created something that not only got great traction with users, but also appeased the client. A win/win scenario. Since then I’ve kept in touch with Andrew as he has an amazing understanding of how media is being consumed across channels, the technology challenges facing publishers and a view of the Australian media world that is hard to beat. He has been a leading driver of the evolution of ninemsn and its position as a leading, innovative content business in Australia, leading a large team of journalists and producers that together control some of the biggest destination sites in Australia.

Lots is happening at Nine Entertainment/ninemsn right now – the amazing ratings success of the block, the introduction of trade brand MI9 and the Summer Olympics coming up in July – so it felt like a good time to ask Andrew a few questions and get his opinion on a bunch of things.

TD: ninemsn has evolved into mi9 – can you explain what this means in terms of product evolution and also benefits to ninemsn users?

AH: Mi9 is natural move for us, but it’s more of a trade/sales story than one for our audience. The joint venture (50/50 Microsoft and Nine Entertainment Co.) had got to the point where a number of diverse businesses were operating under the ninemsn banner that the trade rightfully equated with our network of 80 owned-and-operated sites. These businesses include Cudo, Microsoft Advertising Network (MMN), Microsoft Ad Exchange, Hotmail, Bing, comparison sites Rate City and iSelect, among others. So the new umbrella brand was created to sit across the entire joint venture. ninemsn is a still a massive part of this group and remains our consumer web and mobile brand. In a nutshell, it means something to us, our shareholders and the trade but it’s business as usual for our audience and products.

TD: How have the demands on editors/content producers etc changed over the last 5 years as content becomes ‘format’ agnostic and sites like ninemsn feature content that could be copy/images/video/liveblogging/user comments or something that includes elements of each?

AH: The digitisation of journalism has given producers new avenues to express their creativity. We’ve always made a point of recruiting our news journalists from print and then helped them build video, image production and real-time reporting skills on top of that base. The biggest change has been the demand for analytical and distribution skills. Our producers monitor real-time analytical tools (some they have built themselves) to get a read on the audience and tweak the mix or pitch accordingly. They’re also good at distributing their stories through social media and search. Understanding the way social distribution works, where the levers are and when to pull them are essential components of the producer skill set.  Sharing is the ultimate valuation of a story. The more it gets shared, the more valuable we believe it is to our audience so social is embedded into our editorial workflows and culture.

TD: Which companies do you believe are at the forefront of content creation and delivery in 2012 and why?

AH: Much innovation in content creation is coming from the edges, from individual bloggers and smaller publishers. I like what the Business Spectator crew are doing perhaps as much for the niche they’re occupying and the overall business play as the content, but the journalism is high-value. Crikey is always an interesting read. Gawker’s approach is worth following – Nick Denton is about a year ahead of the pack and wilfully cuts through the crap surrounding digital/social media. The Atlantic has done a great job in journalism and distribution. I admire News Limited’s ability to generate news and know its audience. On the distribution front, Zite on the iPad is excellent. It’s a news aggregator that has exposed me to many of the great small bloggers and publishers covering technology and Silicon Valley, two of my favourite news topics. And while they’re in our stable, I think Nine News TV has aced it on the distribution front. They have ground out a strong position against Seven in part by reeling in audience across the schedule with news story promos. They use social media well too. And at the risk of moving into shameless plug territory, the ninemsn newsroom is one of the most innovative and forward-looking content organisations around. They have made the audience their absolute focus. Users are now a major source of news stories (we tap them for story tips) and the key distributors of our content (through social media).  Our news operation generates more traffic from Facebook than any of our competitors. We’re proud of that.

TD: Sometimes it feels that it’s more viable to create conduits for other people’s content (ie social media, twitter, Facebook) rather than investing in the creation of content? How do you see this working over the next 5-10 years as content creators and content conduits compete for investment and ad revenue?

AH: People who make great content needn’t worry. The money will come.  If not through advertising, then through subscriptions, sponsorships, transactions or endorsements. Distributors need content and will continue to. I think it’s these middle men distributors/publishers who will feel the pinch over time. In video, for example, I think Hulu and NetFlix will get squeezed by the studios/content owners. As insidious as it is, Demand Media created a clever content model that straddles content creation, distribution and media sales. Then there’s the Silicon Valley social crew, such as Facebook, who are making money by advertising against user-generated content but appear to want to stay out of directly monetising professional news content. There are also the aggregators such as Flipboard, Zite and Pulse who are, or will one day, serve ads around the content others are producing. That’s already rankling the content owners/makers.

TD: The Voice has been a huge success both on TV and online. Can you give us an idea of the work involved in trying to create a format that lives so naturally across channels; and do you think this is the future of ‘live entertainment/reality’ type programming (ie – it becomes a cross channel event not a TV show).

AH: I had a chat to our Head of TV and Video, Ben Watts, about this and he says the format has worked so well as a cross-channel  event is because, primarily, the core show is so good. Nine and Shine have taken almost every aspect to the next level – from the calibre of coaches, to the production values, to the volume of great behind-the-scenes video content and the level of social media integration. It has been the most demanding TV integration ninemsn has worked on, but also by far the most rewarding and successful. We are currently working with Nine to raise the bar a little bit higher still with the rebirth later this year of the original ‘multi-media event’, Big Brother.

TD: The London Olympics is the first time in a long time 9 has broadcast the summer Olympics … what does ninemsn have planned and how important will ninemsn be to 9’s Olympic coverage?

AH: We’re throwing the kitchen sink at the Olympics because Nine has the rights and the time zone works well for us. The timing is great because we have the catch-up TV web streaming rights on a six-hour delay so all the big overnight races will be ready to view each morning at ninemsn. We’re integrating with Nine’s coverage from TODAY through the schedule. We will have a team producing original video content in London alongside the Nine TV guys and bulked-up team in Sydney running our Olympics site around the clock for the 17 days of the Games. We’ve been alongside Nine from the start on editorial planning, logistics and sales. All of the Olympic partners and sponsors are working with the group across web and TV. It’s going to be huge.

 

Wolff on Facebook and the issues it raises …

Michael Wolff unleashed on the ultimate value of Facebook last week in a very powerful piece in MIT’s ‘Technology Review’ titled ‘The Facebook Fallacy’.

“Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.”

The article is worth a read – and is similar in tone to what commentators like Bob Hoffman have been saying for the better part of 2 years. The piece is controversial by design. It is worth a read for anyone working in media or advertising. It raises questions that the industry needs to be discussing at a point where media and advertising appears to be addicted to self-harm.

However, the author isn’t another ill-qualified tech fanboy masquerading as a journalist like most tech media coverage. It’s Michael Wolff – a guy who has dedicated his entire professional life to media. Media and advertising are in his DNA – his parents worked in the industry – and he himself tried to make it big in the first rush of the dotcom boom with his own media company. In short, he is as qualified as any to deliver observations around the mechanics of the media industry.

This isn’t to say what he is saying is necessarily right or wrong – it’s just with his background it’s worth considering what he’s saying within this piece and why many of the issues have significant importance beyond the context of the article.

So what is he saying? Well … I took the following out of the piece and would be keen to hear your thoughts on these issues.

Facebook can’t match it’s IPO price and is overvalued

My knowledge of the share market is limited so it’s hard to comment here. The only observations I’ll make are, for one, the Facebook IPO was fully subscribed at $38  a share … so those people have to have thought it was worth the $100b valuation the company was seeking when doing the capital raise. Secondly, right now at $33 a share FB is trading at a multiple of 105 … most (not all) ‘mature’ companies trade anywhere between 10-20x. can the company sustain a valuation of $100b+ with earnings of $1b? Who knows … it really depends on the appetite of people who want to buy the stock. I am confident Facebook has significant opportunity for revenue growth on the horizon and is second only to Google in long term revenue potential online. The opportunity is there but the ad product right now isn’t. However, the ad product has evolved a lot over the past 5 years and will continue to.

“At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media.”

This is the big question – which has yet to be answered aside for Google. Wolff raises that the NY Times makes approximately $1,000 from every print sub … but is making less than $5 annually from every web user.  FB makes about the same. Most ad funded web businesses are making somewhere between 1-6 dollars per user per annum regardless of scale. It raises the question – how can these companies grow if user numbers don’t grow and ad yields drop? Won’t lower yields mean lower extraction and ultimately impact revenues in a negative way? With media agencies obsessed to the point of distraction around lowering CPM (often out of context) publishers are going to find it hard to earn more money from their efforts. So whilst most web publishers are making around $5 per user per year, even the lowest performing FTA TV Network – Network 10 – is making revenues around $31 per year on every single person living in Australia.

“Network technology allows advertisers to more precisely locate and assemble audiences outside of branded channels.”

This is the issue with re-targeting. I guess needs to be a hate the game don’t hate the player scenario. Up until about 12 months ago no one was forcing publishers to place retargeting tags on their pages – many were doing it either through naivety or in a chase for dollars (or both). Sure, it is flooding the market with a lot of ‘cheap-premium’ inventory (ie reach a Business Spectator reader on site that tells you how to remove red wine stains) … which isn’t doing anyone any favours (more ads, lower yields, more crap ads, more lines to manage, more publishers to verify etc) but ultimately the retargeting/cookie hoarding is now a part of the media mix. And this cookie dropping relies ultimately on premium inventory existing … as without it the middlemen can’t reach the premium audience on cheap sites.

“I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value”

I do …  Maybe Australia isn’t as bad as the US. Unfortunately I also know people engaged in the above too. Either way, no one is having an easy run right now. It’s a brutal market.

“In its Herculean efforts to maintain its overall growth, Facebook will continue to lower its per-user revenues, which, given its vast inventory, will force the rest of the ad-driven Web to lower its costs. The low-level panic the owners of every mass-traffic website feel about the ever-downward movement of the cost of a thousand ad impressions (or CPM) is turning to dread, as some big sites observed as much as a 25 percent decrease in the last quarter, following Facebook’s own attempt to book more revenue.”

This is the big issue … there is so much inventory available that it is becoming next to worthless. You can buy inventory for 1 cent. You can buy targeted inventory for 10 cents. Targeted inventory with age/gender 5-6 years ago was something you bought from ninemsn for $15-20 CPMs. Now there’s an infinite supply for 10 cents or less. To compete publishers feel they need more inventory, more users, more 0’s … but all that does is add more inventory to an industry than is most likely doubling its amount of available inventory every few months but growing annually in terms of spend by maybe 15-20% PA at best. This to me makes no sense. It’s like a supermarket ordering 1,000 apples a day. At the end of the day 900 are unsold so they give them away for 10 cents. At the end of the day the manager says … we need more apples. If we had 2,000 apples we’ll be right. Then at the end of the next day they sell the same amount of 100 at a good price, giving away the other 1,900 below cost. The manager comes in again, shakes his head and orders 3,000 for the next day.

Wolff makes a claim that internet advertising ultimately doesn’t work. I am unsure I agree. But I do agree that there is simply too much of it around now to be effective. We need to throttle supply bigtime … create some scarcity and stop the relentless pursuit of ads everywhere. It’s funny – TEN right now is the whipping boy of the Australian media industry … it’s considered backwards, old–hat and out of touch with what consumers and advertisers want. Still – it makes $38 (edited 2 June 2012 – source = http://tencorporate.com.au/lib/pdf/2011/2011AnnualReview.pdf) of revenue for every single citizen of Australia (assuming 22m people in Australia in Australia watch Ten at least once a month) whilst leading Australian digital networks and publishers are making anywhere between $1 and $5 per regular user. A business like Seven makes significantly more than Ten … which makes you wonder whether people like Kerry Stokes are wondering why they can make $58.90 (edited 2 June – source – http://www.sevenwestmedia.com.au/docs/annual-reports/2011-annual-report.pdf)  per viewer per annum but 10-15% for the same eyeball online per annum.

Is the old line ‘dollars for dimes’ still as true as ever within digital except for Google? Google on revenues of $1b or thereabouts is making $40-$50+ from its users per year, in the process being the only digital business that can rival the per-reader/user extraction of old media. Not bad. Can Facebook match it? I guess we’ll see. One thing is clear – right now it is bloody tough going for most digital publishers. Well, except Google 😉